Senior Safety-Critical Software Engineer (Run-Time Assurance)

About the role

Shield AI, a defense-tech company, is looking for a Senior Safety-Critical Software Engineer to join its Hivemind Foundations team. The team builds core products that bring resilient autonomy and intelligence to aircraft and other platforms, and the role focuses on designing, developing and integrating a safety-critical Run-Time Assurance (RTA) product that keeps autonomy safe, predictable and effective at the edge.

Key responsibilities

• Develop, integrate and test configurable RTA components that monitor autonomy behavior and support safe operation across representative platforms and scenarios.
• Adapt reusable C++ safety capabilities into production runtime components, including interface integration, configuration wiring, and unit, component and integration tests.
• Implement real-time C++ code at the boundary between mission autonomy, high-assurance middleware and flight-control interfaces.
• Integrate safety-critical software with aircraft hardware for hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) and flight-test campaigns, from single-aircraft test points to multi-agent collaborative concepts of operation.
• Strengthen engineering evidence through CI, static and dynamic analysis, code reviews, documentation, designs, ICDs, system models, test results and traceability artifacts.
• Share safe software practices through code reviews, design discussions and technical write-ups.

Required profile

• Typically a minimum of 5 years of related experience with a Bachelor's degree, or 4 years with a Master's, or 2 years with a PhD, or equivalent experience.
• Experience building software for real-time, embedded, robotics, autonomy, aerospace or similarly constrained systems.
• Experience integrating software with hardware, simulation, HIL or production-like test environments and diagnosing reliability or performance issues.
• Ability to write clear technical documentation and collaborate across software, systems, test and platform teams.

Required skills

• Strong C++ development, including modern C++, testing, debugging and performance-aware design.
• Familiarity with C++ design patterns and working within an existing architecture.
• Git and Linux, with CI/CD and test-focused development.
• Preferred: autonomy middleware, Python-based configuration tooling, CMake, Conan, MISRA C++ or JSF AV C++, and airworthiness or software assurance frameworks such as MIL-HDBK-516 or DO-178C.